The rust belt can't really fall back on tourism like California can. Worst case scenario all software jobs evaporate and it becomes Florida with better weather
LA has a highly diverse economy, it’s really only the Bay Area that has diversification issues.
The rust belt actually does quite well with tourism, though my research for responding to your comment seems to indicate to me that tourism is important everywhere.
Back in the 90s, it was the opposite as miliary/aerospace declined in SoCal.
I'm a native Michigander and long-time Californian (both subject to booms/busts) who recently took a road trip to the Midwest and back. If it weren't for family and friends, I probably wouldn't venture east of the 100th parallel. I was surprised by this.
I’m over in the rust belt and all I hear about California these days is it’s full of homeless people and crime that goes unchecked. It’s not looking as appealing as a vacation destination as it did 20 years ago. Maybe this perception doesn’t match the reality you see living there, but when it comes to attracting tourists, perception is everything.
I can only assume you think I’m watching Fox News all day. Here is an article from CNN[0] which talks about the significant number of stores closing in a popular tourist area, and while they try to explain all the reasons for it, homeless people (sorry, “unhoused populations”) and crime are still mentioned. It also mentions California has 30% of the counties unhoused, which is way higher than I thought it would be and paints an even worse picture than the one I had.
This article is a couple years old, so maybe things have started to turn around from the investments that were made, but reputations take time to change, as good news doesn’t get reported on nearly as often as bad news.
Unfortunately, if you live in a different country, it’s quite difficult. The only news coming from the USA are the shocking ones. All news organisations are like this. I didn’t hear anything else about for example California in the past decades in European news, just these:
- Schwarzenegger
- Homelessness
- Fires
Of course, since I’ve been in America several times, I know that reality is completely different than what average for example Hungarian knows about America.
And even as I read a lot of American news, my first longer talk with a religiously Trump supporter was eye opening. So people in other countries need to tackle several layers of distortions to know what’s really happening there.
But of course that’s true for every single country.
I'll take "lawless" California over seeing the same Rankin cop watching a stop sign at the entrance to Braddock in order to write "rolling stop" tickets every 15 minutes. I also like that I don't have to worry about a police chief holding me at gunpoint because the fire alarm happened to go off while I was alone in a warehouse space that I was renting.
I'm going to guess that the people who think the entire state looks like LA in 1992 probably weren't going to vacation here in the first place.
There are plenty of dying places in the desert and on the beach tourists can visit, it's just the "dying places" part that makes them aversive to tourism.
